This morning when I went to park my bike near my Chinese school I noticed a line of 50+ bikes where we “aren’t supposed” to park our bikes…I was wondering how they would enforce this.  It’s exactly like any of the other “laws” this country has.  We drive on the right side of the street?  But what if I only need to go 100 meters on the wrong side of the street?  Is that okay?  I think the laws broken the most are traffic laws, and next to that it’s tax evasion.  But that’s another blog post.

The weekday homeschool kids are getting into a better routine and are therefore much better behaved.  The struggle with this group now is to get them to learn algebra in a language they don’t speak natively.  Hmm….this could be interesting.  (To clarify–I teach at two different “homeschools”–one is the FOC “homeschool” and the other one is a co-op of teenage girls. The aformentioned homeschoolers are the FOC students…7 boys and 1 girl)

Having never taught in a multi-grade classroom, I’m finding it difficult to overcome the language barriers while teaching three different levels of math.  Thankfully, the girl (Vivian) is really awesome at learning things on her own, and her English is better than her Chinese.  (I have Vivian on Mondays at the co-op homeschool also!)  She basically reads through the algebra book on her own and does the lessons.  She’s awesome.  Every Monday after our classes together, we share a taxi back to my part of the city because she stays with my friend Gretl so that she doesn’t have to get up so early to come to our school. (She lives over an hour away in the northern suburbs in a large house.)

As I’m writing this, I just got home from tutoring a 9th grade boy, Mark, in US History.  He’s going to the US for high school after this year and he desperately needs help with his English if he’s going to survive.  His mother cooks supper for me every time I go to their apartment.  They live about a 15 ish minute bike-ride away, and they don’t care where I park my bike… 🙂

Hopefully I’ll be more interesting after I’ve had some good sleep! That’s all for now…